Rails has a low learning curve? Hardly. You need to know Ruby
Ruby on Rails is often (incorrectly) billed as the framework that makes web development easy. Unfortunately a lot of people take this to mean “Anyone can make a web site with Rails” or “You can get started with Rails in 15 minutes“. Unfortunately neither is the case but regardless hundreds of thousands of people1 are flocking to Rails to start making a web app for everything under the sun.
These people learn in hurry that Rails is actually quite a large beast2 and jump right into working with Rails without taking time to learn the programming language that Rails uses… Ruby. Almost like Ruby doesn’t exist. If I had to guess I would say people coding Rails apps without actually knowing Ruby has inevitably lead to the Rails community’s pseudo status as a ghetto.
I must confess, I was one of the Rails coders who didn’t know Ruby when I first started with Rails. Very few people who come to Rails known Ruby due to Ruby’s limited popularity before Rails came along. For about the past 7 months I have been trudging along, learning more about Ruby every day3 and the code I write for Rails projects now is much better. Ruby programming constructs like blocks, lamba, proc, etc are fairly advanced topics that I am probably only beginning to comprehend.
Most people might think it is obvious that you would need to know a framework’s programming language before you started using the framework. Certainly you would not attempt J2EE development without first knowing Java. For some reason this has not always been the case with Rails.
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Instant Rails has been downloaded over 400,000 times. ↩
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The Rails Way which contains everything a Rails developer needs to know about Rails is 912 pages. ↩
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Largely thanks to Project Euler. ↩
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We are in the age of everyone jump on the bandwagon and make as money off of it as possible before it collapses.
Nothing surprising.